Lee A. DuBridge

Lee Alvin DuBridge (September 21, 1901 – January 23, 1994) was an American physicist and academic administrator. He led the MIT Radiation Laboratory, served as president of Caltech, and advised three U.S. presidents on science policy.

DuBridge's early research on the photoelectric effect produced the standard text on the subject, and at the University of Rochester he built one of the most powerful cyclotrons in the United States. In 1940, Ernest Lawrence and Alfred Loomis recruited him to direct the newly established MIT Radiation Laboratory, which under his leadership grew from a few dozen physicists to a staff of approximately 4,000 and developed over 100 types of microwave radar for the Allied war effort. DuBridge's management of the Rad LAb established a model for subsequent "big science" partnerships between civilian science and the military.

After the war DuBridge served as president of the California Institute of Technology for twenty-three years, overseeing a period of rapid growth in which the campus, endowment, and faculty roughly tripled in size. He held senior science advisory positions under presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon, and was a prominent defender of academic freedom during the McCarthy era.

Time featured him on its cover in 1955, calling him "the senior statesman of science." Harold Brown and John D. Roberts, in their memoir for the American Philosophical Society, described him as "one of the most influential American scientists of the 20th century."